Every time I hear about these "rationalist" guys they always seem completely bonkers. Not rational at all.
That’s because the “rational” part is a personal shroud for their delusion.
String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
531–540 of 952 posts
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#532Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#533Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
> any evil one trans person does, is used to stain all trans people. recognize this tendency; don't let this become like blood libel. As a Christian, I can empathize. The wrongs and hypocrisies of so many are heaped on those who have no relation to the actions.
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I'm not sure that really captures how it works. For a given individual, being blamed for something you didn't do, maybe even shunned for it, sucks regardless of the reason. I don't think it's productive to try the weigh one person's emotional hurt from being shunned against another's.
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
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My best friend in college knew she was a woman when she was a small child (though her mom and her birth certificate disagreed.) Nobody was going to talk her out of it. She got kicked out of the Air Force Academy on account of it. The nation's loss was my gain because she was the most awesome engineering student and science fiction fan and after working in many military-industrial complex jobs she's working on a proje…
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Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#536Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow what a blast from the past. Sounds like /r/Tulpas. I've always thought it was a purely rhetorical trick + disassociation, and obvious what is happening and why. Sleep deprecation has always been part of it since that makes it harder to notice the errors at the edge of your perception. It goes back to at least the 2010s I think. There is some precedent; the Twin Flame cult coerced transition in some members if I r…
The specific technique here is unihemispherical sleep. Stimulating one side of the body while resting the other (one eye closed) to get one hemisphere to fall asleep. I think Gwen originally developed this trick to probe the mind and see if behavior was altered when one hemisphere was asleep versus the other. However, it turns out that when you do this, the brain as a whole does not get adequate sleep, even if you al…
The technique might have 'merely' prevented deep sleep due to interruptions; similar to why uberman[1] doesn't work.
When I was younger I stayed up to see what happens. The worst experience of my life was when I lied down to sleep and felt 'too tired to go to sleep' and then started hallucinating sirens. I have no idea how long I was up; after a few days I lost track. I had to paced to stay awake, which I did the entire time. I got pronounced disassociative symptoms - which I'm prone to anyway - ("it's not me in control of my body; there is a mutiny", "my reflection is weird/scary/different; that is not me", "the lines that make up the walls and reality don't seem to lay correctly"), gaps in memory, broken pattern matching (everything looks like a spider, chasing down mundane sounds to figure out what they are), and mixing up memories and imagined thoughts (e.g., fill up a cup, go to drink from it, it is empty and I'm not sure if I filled it up and then drank from it or imagined filling it up or if my memories are out of order).
Given the loss of contact with reality, I could see it being easy to manipulate people if you are in the room with them. I was alone, but if someone told me another me talked to them and then drank from the cup, the mix up could easily seem like evidence that it had actually happened that way, especially if I was trusting, vulnerable and open-minded. And once someone has a model that suggests that, they would probably make up stories on their own to support it.
So, yeah, definitely agree on the importance of sleep.
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Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#537most 2025 headline I have yet to see
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But they don't apply formal or "formalist" approaches, they invoke the names of formal methods but then extract from them just a "vibe". I broadly agree with this criticism, but I also think it's kind of low-hanging. At least speaking for myself (a former member of those circles), I do indeed sit down and write quantitative models when I want to estimate things rigorously, and I can't be the only one who does. > In…
Perhaps I overemphasized it, but a personal experience on that front was key to realizing that the lesswrong community was in aggregate a bunch of bullshit sophistic larpers. In short, some real world system had me asking a simply poised probabilities question. I eventually solved it. I learned two things as a result, one (which I kinda knew, but didn't 'know' before) is that the formal answer to even very simple que…
This is an excellent explanation of the flaws inherent in the rationalist philosophy. I’m not deeply involved in the community but it seems like there’s very little appreciation of the limits of first principles based reasoning. To put it simply, there are ideas and phenomena that are strictly inaccessible to pure logical deduction. This also infects their thoughts about AI doom. There’s very little mention of how the AI will collect data or marshall physical resources. Instead it just reads physics textbooks then infers an infallible plan to amass infinite power. It’s worth noting that the AGI god’s abilities seem to align pretty well with Yudkowsky’s conception of why he is a superior person.
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#539Most of the news coverage I've seen of this story is omitting what some might consider a relevant detail: almost all the members of this group are trans. This is a divisive topic, but failing to mention this makes me worry a story is pushing a particular agenda rather than trying to tell the facts. Here's what the story looks like if the trans activism is considered central to the story: https://thepostmillennial.com…
it's been an exhausting couple of weeks for me, as a trans person. one executive order after another, explicitly attacking us. scrambling to update all my documents, navigating a Kafkaesque bureaucracy with constantly shifting rules. now this. there are like six Zizians. there are millions of trans people. I'm sure that many of the Zizians being trans says something about the Ziz cult, but Ziz doesn't say anything ab…
It’s not about blood libel or attribution of evil. But even trans people acknowledge that transness is comorbid with other personality disorders.
Re: String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
> any evil one trans person does, is used to stain all trans people. recognize this tendency; don't let this become like blood libel. As a Christian, I can empathize. The wrongs and hypocrisies of so many are heaped on those who have no relation to the actions.
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